This study examined the combined influences of national levels of socioeconomic status (SES), social capital, and rights and freedoms on population level physical and mental health outcomes. Indicators of mental health were suicide rates, alcohol consumption, and tobacco use. Indicators of physical health included life expectancy, infant mortality rates, and prevalence of HIV. Using pathway ana...

The question of Jewish ancestry has been the subject of controversy for over two centuries and has yet to be resolved. The "Rhineland hypothesis" depicts Eastern European Jews as a "population isolate" that emerged from a small group of German Jews who migrated eastward and expanded rapidly. Alternatively, the "Khazarian hypothesis" suggests that Eastern European Jews descended from the Khazars...

Described from the steppe zones north of the Black Sea, Caucasus, and central Asia, Gryllotalpa stepposa Zhantiev was recently recorded from a few localities in Greece, R. Macedonia, and Bulgaria. In May 2015, several specimens were collected from Ivrinezu Mare in Romania, which suggested a continuous distribution area of the species, stretching from the central Balkans to central Asia. Thus, t...

[1] The Arabia-Eurasia collision deforms an area of 3,000,000 km of continental crust, making it one of the largest regions of convergent deformation on Earth. There are now estimates for the active slip rates, total convergence and timing of collision-related deformation of regions from western Turkey to eastern Iran. This paper shows that extrapolating the present day slip rates of many activ...

Heterogeneous pyritaceous-polymetallic and copper-zinc-pyrrhotine deposits on the South slope of the Greater Caucasus are located in the Lower-Middle Jurassic terrigenous sediments. They were formed under a wide variation of physico-chemical parameters of mineral formation and are characterized by specific mineralogical-geochemical peculiarities. Ore-formation occurred in three stages. In the f...